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I explain: A living body is illuminated by soul: each organ
and member participates in soul after some manner peculiar to
itself; the organ is adapted to a certain function, and this
fitness is the vehicle of the soul-faculty under which the
function is performed; thus the seeing faculty acts through the
eyes, the hearing faculty through the ears, the tasting faculty
through the tongue, the faculty of smelling through the nostrils,
and the faculty of sentient touch is present throughout, since in
this particular form of perception the entire body is an
instrument in the soul's service.
The vehicles of touch are mainly centred in the nerves- which
moreover are vehicles of the faculty by which the movements of
the living being are affected- in them the soul-faculty concerned
makes itself present; the nerves start from the brain. The brain
therefore has been considered as the centre and seat of the
principle which determines feeling and impulse and the entire act
of the organism as a living thing; where the instruments are
found to be linked, there the operating faculty is assumed to be
situated. But it would be wiser to say only that there is
situated the first activity of the operating faculty: the power
to be exercised by the operator- in keeping with the particular
instrument- must be considered as concentrated at the point at
which the instrument is to be first applied; or, since the soul's
faculty is of universal scope the sounder statement is that the
point of origin of the instrument is the point of origin of the
act.
Now, the faculty presiding over sensation and impulse is vested
in the sensitive and representative soul; it draws upon the
Reason-Principle immediately above itself; downward, it is in
contact with an inferior of its own: on this analogy the
uppermost member of the living being was taken by the ancients to
be obviously its seat; they lodged it in the brain, or not
exactly in the brain but in that sensitive part which is the
medium through which the Reason-Principle impinges upon the
brain. They saw that something must be definitely allocated to
body- at the point most receptive of the act of reason- while
something, utterly isolated from body must be in contact with
that superior thing which is a form of soul [and not merely of
the vegetative or other quasi-corporeal forms but] of that soul
apt to the appropriation of the perceptions originating in the
Reason-Principle.
Such a linking there must be, since in perception there is some
element of judging, in representation something intuitional, and
since impulse and appetite derive from representation and reason.
The reasoning faculty, therefore, is present where these
experiences occur, present not as in a place but in the fact that
what is there draws upon it. As regards perception we have
already explained in what sense it is local.
But every living being includes the vegetal principle, that
principle of growth and nourishment which maintains the organism
by means of the blood; this nourishing medium is contained in the
veins; the veins and blood have their origin in the liver: from
observation of these facts the power concerned was assigned a
place; the phase of the soul which has to do with desire was
allocated to the liver. Certainly what brings to birth and
nourishes and gives growth must have the desire of these
functions. Blood- subtle, light, swift, pure- is the vehicle most
apt to animal spirit: the heart, then, its well-spring, the place
where such blood is sifted into being, is taken as the fixed
centre of the ebullition of the passionate nature.
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